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Looking
north on Third Avenue and 55th Street. 6:15 PM. Photo: JH.
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It
rained in New York yesterday. And rained and rained
and rained. And so … the traffic was
enough to drive anyone nuts. There wasn’t a crosstown street
that wasn’t clogged to the point that it took five or six
light changes to move one block. Very bad for business. And very
bad for everything else too. There are too many vehicles in Manhattan
and although it is obvious, it is also a menace, dangerous and
unsustainable for the health of the city.
I was in a cab, taking an hour for what ordinarily would have been
a ten minute ride, over to “21” where Sir Harry
Evans was moderating another one of those fascinating The
Week luncheons.
This was called “Memo to the President: Recommendations From
the Private Sector.”
“21” was packed, despite the weather, upstairs and down. Just
inside the door, I ran into Pepe and Emilia Fanjul. Pepe was meeting
the President of the Dominican Republic where he owns a little
resort of not a little luxury called Casa de Campo. After the luncheon,
he told me he was going to Spain to visit Juan Carlos, the King
of Spain. Pepe gets around, no?
Meanwhile, the dining room upstairs in “21” was packed … packed … for
The Week luncheon. I was late, of course, so I’m relying
on Jon Marder, who handles the PR for the event, but he handed
me a list of the guests – Herman Badillo, Margaret Carlson, Monica Crowley, Robin
Duke, Dominick Dunne, Princess Firyal of Jordan, Roy Goodman, Betsy
Gotbaum, Catharine
Hamilton, Sharon Hoge, Francine LeFrak, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Jamie
Gregory, Mary McFadden, Dru Heinz, Skitch Henderson, Lynn Nesbit,
Lauren Hutton, Sale Johnson, Myron Kandel, Henry Luce III, Georgette
Mosbacher, Sam Peabody, Muriel Siebert, Bill Moyers, Jerry Speyer,
Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel, Andrew Tisch, Garrick
Utley, Liz Fondaras, Donald Zilkha, and on and on and on.
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Pete
Peterson
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The first guest panelists were Robert Rubin and Pete
Peterson.
Mr. Rubin, as you know, was the Secretary of the Treasury under
Bill Clinton and had more than a little something to do with the
enormous reduction in the national deficit.
Mr. Peterson, who if you didn’t know, was a major corporate
executive in his thirties (as CEO of Bell & Howell), also chairman
and CEO of Lehman Brothers, also Secretary of Commerce under President
Nixon, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and
current chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private investment
firm.
He’s also written several books including the current business
best-seller Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican
Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About
It.
The title of Mr. Peterson’s book pretty much tells you how
he feels about our current economic situation in this country.
The situation from his point of view is pretty dire and will affect
everybody when it finally hits. The reason the public is not more
conscious of it, he thinks, is because there is a “conspiracy” between
the political system and the media.
However, in his opinion, the growing national deficit and the current-account
deficit (which refers to the country’s growing dependence
on foreign capital) are heading for a meltdown. When this occurs,
in the opinion of those who think like Mr. Peterson, the value
of the dollar will plummet (even more than it has today) and the
interest rates will climb fast and high. “A spike,” is
Mr. Peterson’s word for it. How that will affect the average
consumer can be imagined by anyone who has bought real estate in
the past few years without a fixed rate mortgage. Or anyone who
has credit card debt.
You wonder why the media and the politicians don’t want to
talk about it? Mr. Rubin, also a reasonable man, like Mr. Peterson,
who often in the course of the conversation today made the claim
that anything he said was not meant to be “predictive” (in
other words, he didn’t want to be held to it, but ...)
did warn that “the unsustainable cannot be sustained.” I
think he was talking about the acceleration of the growth of the
national debt and the current-accounts deficit.
It so happened that yesterday morning before I left the house,
someone sent me the editorial opinion from this week’s Economist entitled “The
Disappearing Dollar” in
which they pretty much said the same thing (Click
here).
Or, as we say in New York: Oy!
When Messrs Rubin and Peterson were finished, Sir Harry called
upon Grover Norquist, Larry Kudlow who some somewhat
different opinions about the matters at hand. Mr. Norquist is all
for cutting
taxes more. And more and more and more. Mr. Kudlow is optimistic
about the deficits and thinks they’re good for business,
worldwide. In fact, to listen to those guys talk, if you hadn’t
heard what Mr. Rubin and Mr. Peterson had said, you’d think
that any of the problems, such as those mentioned in the Economist’s
editorial, were not so terribly pressing or even realistic.
Usually these luncheons end with some questions but there were
very few this time, just a lot to think about. The audience listened
with great attention right to the very end. Leaving the restaurant
I bumped into Mary McFadden who is just back from
China and Argentina. The China trip was arranged by a Chinese woman
who spent $500,000
taking one hundred people to Shanghai to promote her new art gallery.
The hostess is also an owner of several luxury hotels – the
luxury of which Mary said she’d rarely ever seen before.
Mary was deeply impressed with everything about the country – the
money, the numbers, the huge migration of people from the country
to the city (the greatest migration of its kind in history, she
called it). Shanghai, she said, has forty million people living
there. All I could think about was how they got across town. Then
Mary mentioned it – getting across Shanghai can take forever.
I was thinking about the air pollution and the mobs. People management – there’s
a future profession for someone …
Monday night Alice Mason gave her annual Holiday dinner at
her Upper East Side apartment. Up until a few years ago, Alice, who
has been giving her at home dinners for more than forty years,
used to give them once a month. I think she’d stop in the
summertime. Her guest list has included just about every prominent
social, media, publishing, political and diplomatic individual
who ever mattered in New York over those years.
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Alice
Mason
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These dinners,
which by now must total in the hundreds were orchestrations of
guest lists, (her private resource for her guest list includes
more than 600 names), seating, and menus that bespeak a unique
political acumen and perceptiveness that also made her one of the
most successful private residential real estate brokers in the
history of the city. That is no small statement, I realize, and
Mrs. Mason, has been no small force in the past half century in
seeing that the rich, the famous and the powerful have found suitable
(read “perfect”) domiciles through her canny guidance.
The parties themselves are staged in what, for the number of guests,
is a relatively small space – a living room, a dining room
and a library, with sixty guests at mainly tables of eight. The
menu is provided by Daniel Boulud’s catering
company. Conversation is the highlight of the evening from the
moment the guest enters
and signs the guestbook and is given his or her seating Mrs. Mason’s
daughter Dominique Richard.
There are cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from 8
to 9 in the
art-filled living room and the library. There are many framed photographs
of many of her distinguished guests including Presidents
Carter and Clinton and their wives. At the appointed hours,
the tables, which are already set up, are moved into the spaces
and people
take their places. The tables are purposely on the small size – the
proximity of guests to each other is, in the hostess’ opinion,
very conducive to conversation so that there are often whole tables
involved in the discussion.
The women dress; the men are in black tie. Just as the hostess
intends, there is a kind of coziness to the atmosphere. There are
always people you know, people you know of and have seen or read
about. In the crowd I saw David and Helen Gurley Brown, Vera Wang
and Arthur Becker, Paula Zahn and Richard Cohen, Steve Kroft and
Jenny Conant, Anthony Haden-Guest, Mario Buatta, Eileen Finletter,
Gaetana Enders, Michele and Larry Herbert, Olivia and Warren Hoge,
Joy Rosenthal, Carmen, Boaz Mazor, Christopher Mason, Evelyn and
Leonard Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore and Dr. Robert Levine, Kathy Sloane,
Maurice Sonnenberg, Charlie Scheips, Peggy Siegal, Nan and Gay
Talese, Mary and Mike Wallace, Laura and Will Zeckendorf, Connie
and Randy Jones, Serena Stewart, Roger Webster, Alexis Gregory,
Roz Jacobs, Paul Beirne, Jacques Leviant, Sondra Mack, Marisca
and Jan Vilcek, Alex Donner, Mona Ackerman and Richard Cohen, Mary
Fitzgibbons, Laura and Will Zeckendorf, Patricia Altschul and David
Coiro.
If Mrs. Mason were to write about the intricacies of her business
and its success or even the history of her fabled party-giving,
it could be the ultimate book on the business of private residential
real estate or the ultimate book on entertaining in New York. But
alas, she never will. |
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Guy
Talese and Olivia Hoge |
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Charlie
Scheips and Paul Beirne
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Serena
Stewart
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Mary
and Mike Wallace with Mary Tyler Moore
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Christopher
Mason, Nan Talese, and Alexis Gregory
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Christopher
Mason and Boaz Mazor
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Arthur
Becker and Mona Ackerman
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Mario
Buatta and Connie Jones
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Kathy
Sloane
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Jacques
Leviant and Gaetana Enders
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Dominique
Richard
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Michele
Herbert and Vera Wang
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Pat
Altschul and Maurice Sonnenberg
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Larry
Herbert
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Warren
Hoge
and Mary Hilliard
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Joy
Rosenthal and David Brown
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The
dinner table pre-dinner
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The
dinner table during dinner
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L.
to r.: Randy Jones; Paul Beirne, Boaz Mazor, and
Alice Mason; Anthony Haden-Guest and Carmen Dell'Orifice.
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The
Windows at Bergdorf Goodman
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The
new snowflake on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street
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